So I’ve been doing quite a bit of research into game engines and 3d modeling software in the past few days. I tried a few engines, the torque one, Irrlicht, and some other ones. 3d modeling software like art of illusion, wings3d, blender, 3ds max. So far I really like 3ds max, however art of illusion was easier for me. But there has been a lot of frustration trying to export my files into .egg.
Can somebody with some experience please tell me what the best (cost aside) 3d modeling software is for use with Panda3d that is not necessarily easy, but, well, easy to use/learn and even easier to export to .egg.
Or even just how to export from 3ds max, or convert something from 3ds max to .egg. Because after 3 days of google all I can do is export without materials. It’s just white…
well i know if you can export as a .x file that you can use x2egg (or something like that) in the bin folder that comes with panda and it will convert to .egg for you.
If cost is no object, I’d recommend Maya, as its integration with Panda is fairly complete.
Next choice in terms of excellence of integration would probably be Blender; I haven’t used it myself, but I understand that the Chicken exporter is quite nice.
3DS Max would be the third choice. There exists a max-to-egg converter, but it is not maintained, and people do report troubles with it. (That said, if you wanted to step up to maintain this converter, it would certainly be welcome.)
Beyond that, anything that can export to .x is probably a decent choice, as the x2egg pipeline is fairly robust. There seem to be a fair number of whatever-to-x converters that are themselves incomplete, though, so YMMV.
It’s hard to predict the amount of trouble you’ll have with any particular modeling package, of course; that depends on a lot of different factors. There are several packages that have good pathways to Panda, and lots of different people have used lots of different packages with success.
You really ought to be able to use Max more successfully than just white textures, though. Have you followed the usual advice of checking your egg file for accurate texture paths?
if you want to export to a chiken egg (.egg) the exporter work very well
instead, don’t give up this game engine i was trying to use another game engine
(crystal space) and it’s was praticly an abandon-ware (honestly) and no python binding (well, a very little bit)
3ds max cost alot of money, maya an arm and the Devcell game engine cost aproximativly 2 arms, your stomac, and a leg: (super dispensive!)
i’ll be honest: panda3d is the only open source game engine that it really work for me, and it worth lerning.
Ok, I’ve managed to get 3ds max to export with materials. I looked in the .egg file and found the file paths for the jpgs were …/blah/blah/blah.jpg so I chaged to just plain blah.jpg and moved the jpgs into the same folder. Success!
I tried to take the roaming Ralph sample and putting my own environment into it, but I get this error when running from cmd:
ralphStartPos = self.environ.find("**/start_point").getPos()
This line is attempting to get the position of a node in the EGG file named “start_point”, which I am going to guess exists in the EGG file distributed with the Roaming Ralph example but not the one you have created.
exactly. the startpos error line is pretty much the most-often ask question here on the forum. try searching for it. you should be able to find dozens of posts about it
